Politics in Mexico

Campaigning as a blood sport

Ganging up on the presidential frontrunner

THE presidential election is not until July 2006, but this week marked the unmistakable start of the campaign. Trumping President Vicente Fox's annual state-of-the-nation speech on September 1st, three days earlier Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftish mayor of Mexico City, drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to a rally, where he set out a 20-point plan for a presidential term. Not only does the mayor top the polls of presidential hopefuls (with 31%). He is also cleverly using a threat of legal action—aimed at excluding him from the race—to focus attention on himself.

Congress, at the government's urging, must decide whether to strip Mr López Obrador of the immunity he enjoys as an elected official so that he can face criminal charges that his administration ignored a court order to stop public works on a plot of private land. If he loses his immunity and were then to be convicted, he would be ineligible to stand for president. The wrangling in Congress, whose new session began this week, could drag on into next year.

This will probably scupper any lingering hope Mr Fox might have of getting approval for economic reforms. It also threatens to inject a dose of poison into Mexican politics. It is not only the mayor's supporters who wonder why the government is determined to pursue what—by Mexican standards—is a pretty trivial charge. State governors from other parties have got away with far worse, from drug-running to embezzlement. Mr López Obrador's spokesman dismisses the charges as “politically motivated”. The mayor has distributed 2.2m copies of a comic-strip book portraying him as battling against “dark forces”.

The mayor's party has also jumped on a recent ruling by the electoral body that Santiago Creel, Mr Fox's interior minister and himself a presidential hopeful, overspent during his losing campaign for mayor against Mr López Obrador in 2000. Mr Creel, too, may now face attempts to bar him from the presidential campaign. As Mexican politics becomes a blood sport, Mr Fox looks more and more like a mere spectator.